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The Facebook IPO is going to be a watershed event in the history of technology. Even though there have been other major tech IPOs in the post-2000-bust era, such as LinkedIn, Demand Media, Groupon and Splunk, this is different and everybody knows it. Sheer scale matters, but it is about more than just the financial scale of the company being born. It is about the new economy and society that are being born, with the new sense of proportions they are bringing into the American economy.

You see, we have still not wrapped our minds around the apparent frivolity of this behemoth that is about to go public at a seemingly insane valuation. Why is this thing going to be worth more than such apparently "serious" companies like Ford? Nearly every conversation I've overheard, and every analysis I've read, eventually circles back to this cognitive dissonance. We are apparently betting the nation's (perhaps the planet's) economic future on a service that essentially enables petabytes of frivolous banality to flow through the world's data pipes.

The critics are not wrong. Facebook is frivolous. Incredibly so. What they get wrong though is assuming that old economy stuff is not frivolous. And this is why this IPO is so incredibly important: as I'll argue, after a half-century of over-pricing frivolous banality, the market is finally pricing it right. When you look at it that way, you realize that there is a new General Motors in town: what is good for Facebook is good for America.

How radical is the re-proportioning of the US economy?

The closest comparable event is the radical and rapid shrinking of the the agriculture sector (from around 80% to around 5% if I recall correctly) due to industrialization a century ago.

We are in the midst of an equally rapid and radical shrinking of the sector of the economy that dominated the twentieth century the way agriculture dominated the nineteenth century: the consumer economy. I mean the consumer economy in the core sense of the word: the production and consumption of nice-to-have stuff that is not strictly necessary to sustain life, through the artificial creation of demand by marketers.

The consumer economy in this sense is actually much bigger than what economists estimate, because much of the B2B economy is also ultimately about fueling the consumer economy. If we do the accounting right, it is probably as big as agriculture once was: around 80%. It is about to shrink to around 5%, with Facebook taking a lot of the residual value of this economic sector nearing its end of life.

This is not an easy concept to appreciate. But let's give it a shot.

Facebook is frivolous -- and so is everything else

I remember the beginnings of disbelief in 2007, when Microsoft took a 1.6% strategic stake in Facebook for $240 million, resulting in a valuation of $15 billion. This made Facebook bigger than Ford, a comparison many commentators made at the time. The comparison has only gotten more unbelievable and surreal since then.

The comparison with Ford was and is the psychologically correct one to make. Since GM at the time was about to head into the toilet due to the financial crisis, Ford was the best stand-in for the "What's good for GM is good for America" line (a line due to then chairman Charles Wilson in 1955).

I recall thinking back then that perhaps what upset people was not so much worries about economic fundamentals (nobody understood those anyway, as subsequent events showed) but just a sense that this was somehow undignified. There was almost a sense of moral outrage.

The sense of outrage got me thinking. What exactly is so "serious" about the old economy?

Take the auto industry. For a century people have used cars for completely frivolous things like taking road trips, going to dumb B-movies, going over to visit friends to play board games, or to a workplace to sit in a cubicle and be bored for 8 hours. Drag races, NASCAR, random drives to feel the wind in your face (why not go running so you can lose some weight at the same time?): what is so "serious" about any of this?

Or take the steel industry. We build massive buildings out of steel and concrete to house what? Rows of shops full of stuffed toys, miles and miles of women's clothing racks, perfumes and slurpies. And these malls produce landfills-worth of empty sugar-water cups every year.

Suddenly digital chicken-throwing doesn't seem so bad as an alternative activity. It seems practically like austerity. We get the same amount of frivolity for much less steel, gas, electricity, plastic and landfill waste.

I remember growing up with perhaps half a dozen toys that I played with happily for years. Then I came to America and discovered kids with rooms full of toys (including my own nephew) who got bored of what they had and demanded new toys every few months.

Reflect on the number of trips to Toys 'R Us it takes to sustain the American toy industry. Reflect on the amount of oil and car/truck/train/shipping miles involved. Or the number of chemical engineers employed in plastics factories churning out the raw material for this stuff. Or the high-IQ designers, artists and engineers working at places like Hasbro to design this stuff. Just so kids can have a new roomful of toys every six months, most of which will eventually end up in a landfill after sitting around, unplayed with, for a few years. Are the kids better off? I doubt it. I don't recall feeling particularly deprived of toys as a kid.

Still think the old economy is more serious than Facebook?

Suddenly, Farmville seems very green and eco-friendly.

Or take the acres of trees that are cut down to make paper that is then printed on using harsh chemicals and delivered to your doorstep using gas-guzzling vehicles. For what? So you can read about the latest celebrity train-wreck? Is it really such a bad thing that much of this junk now flows in purely digital form?

Next time you pass a big semi on the highway, with Frito-Lay's logo emblazoned on the side, think about what's inside, and then think about the technical sophistication and "seriousness" of the infrastructure required to make this machine run.